by the mid-1990s, more than half a million factories were at work in guangdong province. onop brown: it is an emerging, uh, ge growtcountry, uh, ve eiting. there's building going on everywhere. the whole province, the whole country, basically, is under construction. narrator: towering hotels and commercial buildings show china's ambition to play a key role on the worldconomic stag in 2001, after years of negotiation, china was admitted to the world trade organization, cementing its role as a player in the global economy. this nike factory, for example, ts in a chain of productn that stretches around the globe. orders for nike footwear are placed in its headquarters in beaverton, oregon, in the united states. complex communication systems allow the head office to arrange raw materials and allocate production to factories around the globe. guangdong has virtually none of the raw materials for making shoes, but they can be imported through hong kong. and here in hong kong, we finally meet the unsung hero of the global economy-- the freight container of containerized shipping. this homel